Hello,
sorry for bringing this up again, but you guys should really invest some time in researching on how to handle this better. I keep colliding with this issue in every single ForestPack scene I work with. The hidden layer simply makes it impossible to keep scene files clean and organized.
What's worse is that it contains bloat that I, and many other people never used, and will never use. In this day and age, rendering is so advanced people rarely use billboards anymore.
Just look how messy my scene looks with forest stuff:
I absolutely struggle to understand how on the one side, your programmers are so smart they can come up with advanced solutions like Effects in ForestPack 4, but on the other hand can't figure out a simple solution of not bloating scenes unless user explicitly decides to use billboards (which almost no one does these days).
Even if it was just another .ini option (same as the one that prevents material override by default), which would be
disabled by default, and which would make FP objects empty by default, without default billboards. And even this option would
break all of the billboards features, I would be still happy about it, as I never ever use them anyway. I actually consider presence of billboards in my scene mistake/problem/bug, so something that would break them would be actually quite welcome from my side.